Project
Human Practices
Dry Lab
Wet Lab
Jamboree
Plant pathogens such as V. dahliae and other fungi (e.g. Fusarium, Puccinia) are predicted to become even more deleterious to the biosphere as the climate becomes warmer. Global warming affects the virulence and range of fungi, endangering cultivated and native plants alike [1]. V. dahliae is only one of the dozens of fungal, bacterial and nematode species that are expected to continue to pose a serious problem in biodiversity conservation and agriculture in the future.
As a team we designed THAELIA with those high stakes in mind. Specifically, our project provides sustainable solutions to some of the 17 SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (SDGs) outlined by the United Nations [2]. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all 193 United Nations Member States in 2015, outlines a plan for confronting the problems that threaten human survival and prosperity.
Sustainable development is a holistic approach to growth that aims to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The 17 SDGs can be grouped in three groups:
1) Economic Growth: Promoting prosperity and economic opportunity while ensuring that economic activities are sustainable and do not deplete resources.
2) Social Inclusion: Ensuring that all individuals have access to basic needs such as education, healthcare, and employment, and that social equity is maintained.
3)Environmental Protection: Preserving natural resources and ecosystems to maintain biodiversity and prevent environmental degradation
Our project mainly focuses on the following Sustainable Development Goals:
Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
Target 2.4: By 2030, ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production, that help maintain ecosystems, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding and other disasters and that progressively improve land and soil quality.
The price of olive oil, a staple in Mediterranean diets, has been rising rapidly in recent years. [4] This has been mainly attributed to consecutive poor harvests in Spain, the world’s leading producer of olive oil. The climatic factors that may have caused the loss in produce, such as extreme heat, are the same factors that weaken the immune responses of the olive tree and make it more susceptible to pathogens such as V. dahliae [5].
Climate change threatens another crucial aspect of plant immunity: the rhizosphere. The amount and diversity of beneficial soil microbes is negatively affected by climate change. This means that plants lose their first line of protection against pathogens. [3]
The compounding of those climate change related factors means that olive trees and other agriculturally important plants will likely become more susceptible to diseases like Verticillium Wilt, as extreme weather events become more frequent. [6] This can prove catastrophic for crop yields and endanger the food security of entire continents.[7] THAELIA attempts to provide a synthetic biology solution that increases plant resilience and simultaneously combats the reliance on less-than-effective fungicides.
Goal 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Target 12.4: By 2020, achieve the environmentally sound management of chemicals and all wastes throughout their life cycle, in accordance with agreed international frameworks, and significantly reduce their release to air, water and soil in order to minimize their adverse impacts on human health and the environment
Fungicides are used in large quantities, especially in Europe and the US, and they are usually applied prophylactically. This not only lowers their effectiveness by allowing pathogens to develop resistance but also contaminates the local aquatic systems. There are many classes of fungicides and most of them pose a threat to at least one of the types of organisms (ie microorganisms, macrophytes, invertebrates, and vertebrates) that live in aquatic environments. [8]
Our project is designed to be modular and easily adaptable, even to fungi that develop resistance to it. Additionally, it poses no threat of toxicity to aquatic life because every component of our system is highly biodegradable. As such, it could be an effective weapon against both pathogenic fungi and synthetic fungicides.
Goal 13:Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
Target 13.1: Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries.
Scientists have demonstrated extensively that climate change impacts the ability of plants to protect themselves from pathogens while bolstering the latter. [1,15] Higher temperatures can contribute to the extension of the range of fungi, which was formerly limited by the cold. This is perfectly exemplified by the modeling experiments of Gustafson et al. The researchers demonstrated that the range of Phytophthora cinnamomi, a root pathogen, is expected to expand Northwards, threatening the few remaining American Chestnuts with total extinction.[9]
Elevated levels of CO2 also pose a threat to plant immunity. For example, wheat, a major component of human diet, when cultivated in high CO2 levels demonstrates a higher likelihood of developing Fusarium head blight (FHB) and Septoria tritici blotch (STB). [10] Moreover, higher humidity and also drought can be beneficial to different types of plant pathogens. [3]
When it comes to Verticillium, the modeling experiments of Juan M. Requena-Mullor et al. indicate that the climatic variable correlated with the highest occurrence of Verticillium Wilt is isothermality. This means that in olive groves where the daily temperature oscillation is larger than the yearly temperature oscillation, higher occurrence of Verticillium is observed. Because V. dahliae requires periods characterized by rain and warm temperature simultaneously, there is a high possibility that climate change could exacerbate its development. [11]
All these challenges have the potential to endanger food production, especially in nations in the Global South that have to deal with the most of those pathogen promoting factors. A syn bio product such as THAELIA, if implemented, could improve the resilience of the agricultural sector to the challenges of climate change.
Goal 14: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.
Target 14.1: By 2025, prevent and significantly reduce marine pollution of all kinds, in particular from land-based activities, including marine debris and nutrient pollution.
Fungicides are used in agriculture around the globe. They tend to bioaccumulate in the soil and in the waterways, contributing to the pollution of aquatic environments. There are many classes of fungicides and none of them are effective against V. dahliae, living farmers to try and contain it with large quantities of ineffective chemicals.
Azoxystrobin, a strobilurin, can be genotoxic to freshwater fish that are exposed to it.[13] Bioaccumulation of Propiconazole and Difenoconazole, both members of the triazole group of fungicides, have been reported to cause hormonal changes in Procypris merus while at the same time causing oxidative damage to several tissues.
Procypric merus, commonly named Chinese ink carp, is a species of the family Cyprinidae. The family contains a plethora of fish species of economic , cultural and culinary importance, especially in East Asia. [10]
Implementing innovative anti fungal strategies such as THAELIA could lessen the reliance of farmers on the chemical agents that can accumulate in the water or inside the fish that we eat. This could help safeguard the health of aquatic organisms and humans alike.
Goal 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
Target 15.2: By 2020, promote the implementation of sustainable management of all types of forests, halt deforestation, restore degraded forests and substantially increase afforestation and reforestation globally
As we have established above, climate change promotes the establishment and the spreading of plant pathogens and hinders the ability of plants to protect themselves. This is true for cultivated and wild plants alike. Due to most forests being relatively unmanaged, the disease outbreaks that mainly affect them do not receive the attention they deserve.[15] This situation is compounded by the fact that globalization and human movement introduce new, invasive pathogens to native forests in an unprecedented rate.[16]
This is the case for fungi such as Phytophthora ramorum, the aforementioned P. cinnamomi and of course V.dahliae [17, supplemental data]. THAELIA, is an adaptable bacterial system, created in a way that allows for the targeting of those soil-borne fungi, after modification of its parts. Due to its modularity, our system aims to keep forests healthy and able to function as the primary carbon sequestrators on land.
Furthermore, replacing chemical fungicides with THAELIA would stop their leaching into non cultivated soil and preserve the local organisms that could be affected by them.
[1]Nnadi, N. E., & Carter, D. A. (2021). Climate change and the emergence of fungal pathogens. PLoS pathogens, 17(4), e1009503. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1009503
[2]UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs - Sustainable Development: The 17 Goals https://sdgs.un.org/goals#icons
[3]Singh, B.K., Delgado-Baquerizo, M., Egidi, E. et al. Climate change impacts on plant pathogens, food security and paths forward. Nat Rev Microbiol 21, 640–656 (2023).
[4]https://www.internationaloliveoil.org/
[5] Lemus-Canovas, M., Insua-Costa, D., Trigo, R.M. et al. Record-shattering 2023 Spring heatwave in western Mediterranean amplified by long-term drought. npj Clim Atmos Sci 7, 25 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-024-00569-6
[6] Robinson, A., Lehmann, J., Barriopedro, D. et al. Increasing heat and rainfall extremes now far outside the historical climate. npj Clim Atmos Sci 4, 45 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-021-00202-w
[7] Eurostat: EU trade in olive oil
[8]Zubrod, J. P., Bundschuh, M., Arts, G., Brühl, C. A., Imfeld, G., Knäbel, A., Payraudeau, S., Rasmussen, J. J., Rohr, J., Scharmüller, A., Smalling, K., Stehle, S., Schulz, R., & Schäfer, R. B. (2019). Fungicides: An Overlooked Pesticide Class?. Environmental science & technology, 53(7), 3347–3365. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.8b04392
[9]Gustafson, E. J., Miranda, B. R., Dreaden, T. J., Pinchot, C. C., & Jacobs, D. F. (2022). Beyond blight: Phytophthora root rot under climate change limits populations of reintroduced American chestnut. In Ecosphere (Vol. 13, Issue 2). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.3917
[10]Váry, Z., Mullins, E., McElwain, J. C., & Doohan, F. M. (2015). The severity of wheat diseases increases when plants and pathogens are acclimatized to elevated carbon dioxide. In Global Change Biology (Vol. 21, Issue 7, pp. 2661–2669). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.12899
[11]Requena-Mullor, J. M., García-Garrido, J. M., García, P. A., & Rodríguez, E. (2020). Climatic drivers of Verticillium dahliae occurrence in Mediterranean olive-growing areas of southern Spain. In M. Di Febbraro (Ed.), PLOS ONE (Vol. 15, Issue 12, p. e0232648). Public Library of Science (PLoS). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0232648
[12]Xiaohong Wang, Xiaoyu Li, Yue Wang, Yingju Qin, Bing Yan, Christopher J. Martyniuk,
A comprehensive review of strobilurin fungicide toxicity in aquatic species: Emphasis on mode of action from the zebrafish model, Environmental Pollution, Volume 275, 2021, 116671, ISSN 0269-7491, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2021.116671
[13] Newton, R., Zhang, W., Xian, Z. et al. Intensification, regulation and diversification: The changing face of inland aquaculture in China. Ambio 50, 1739–1756 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-021-01503-3
[15]Jeger, M. J. (2021). The impact of climate change on disease in wild plant populations and communities. In Plant Pathology (Vol. 71, Issue 1, pp. 111–130). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1111/ppa.13434
[16]Ghelardini, L., Santini, A., & Luchi, N. (2022). Globalization, invasive forest pathogen species, and forest tree health. In Forest Microbiology (pp. 61–76). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-323-85042-1.00035-5
[17]Singh, B.K., Delgado-Baquerizo, M., Egidi, E. et al. Climate change impacts on plant pathogens, food security and paths forward. Nat Rev Microbiol 21, 640–656 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-023-00900-7